Page 10 of Fortune's Blade

“I will protect you,” I told him, and saw his eyes roll as he released me.

“Look,” he said, scraping black hair off his forehead. “We gotta talk, okay?”

I blinked. “Is that not what we have been doing?”

“No! We’ve been bullshitting. But right now, we need to talk.” He knelt down, which was more comfortable than having him loom over me, and looked at me with an odd expression. Part fond, part exasperated, part . . . I wasn’t sure. But it was serious. I could see that much.

My hand reached out and cupped his cheek. He hadn’t been able to shave in a while, and unlike most masters, he had less than perfect bodily control. As a result, his beard was starting to come in in patches. He had tried shaving it off, because it did look rather odd, with a knife we had borrowed from one of the villagers and a bowl of soapy water, but the result had been less than perfect.

I was glad he had stopped.

I liked his face without a lot of chunks carved out of it.

He grasped my wrist and then just held it, staring at me. “Listen.”

“I am listening.”

“Good. Then stop trying to distract me.”

“How am I doing that?” I asked, confused, and heard him sigh again.

He put my hand back on the ground and kept his on top of it, to hold it there. “You aren’t Dory, okay?”

“I know that.”

“You are your own person; you are Dorina. And I need for you to get that, and to start acting like it. Don’t wait for me or anyone else to tell you what to do or how to think or what to feel, okay? You decide. This is your life now—”

“And when it isn’t?”

He frowned, possibly at the sudden roughness in my voice that I couldn’t disguise. “What do you mean, when it isn’t?”

I swallowed. “What I said. I have a body now because we are in Faerie, and souls always manifest bodies here. But what about when it is time to leave?”

It was a thought that had been bothering me more and more. I raised my other hand, and watched it gleam in the moonlight. It looked so strong, so substantial. I could feel the blood rushing through it, see dirt in the creases and the ragged state of the nails.

I turned it this way and that, and then met Ray’s eyes again. “What about when this just . . . dissolves?”

“It won’t!”

“Won’t it?” I looked at him almost as curiously as I had the hand. He was flushed, to the point that the stain on his skin was possible to see in the darkness, and looked agitated. “Why won’t it?”

“Because it won’t! We’ll figure something out, and anyway, who knows? Maybe we don’t have to. Maybe this is how your kind are . . . are born—”

“I don’t have a kind.”

“—like Dory was the chrysalis or something, and now that you’re here, having come out of her—”

“Ray—”

“—maybe you’ll stay. Maybe you’ll go back home and just be like that—”

“And maybe I won’t,” I said gently. “Wouldn’t it then be easier not to begin making distinctions—”

“Bullshit!”

“—that won’t matter soon?”

“They matter! You matter!”